Gathering

Gathering brings together sculptural works, two large-scale canvases, and a series of works on paper. Across the exhibition, traditional acrylic painting is combined with reclaimed fabrics—old T-shirts, canvas, and a tablecloth—hardened, collaged, and reworked. These materials carry prior use within them, allowing each piece to hold traces of touch, repetition, and time.

At the center of the exhibition are two large works, Moveable Feast and The Uttermost Parts, which follow a shared structure. Each pairs a hand sculpture, placed on a pedestal in front of the painting and slightly lower in height, with a horizontal diptych. One panel (60 × 20 inches) bears accumulated paint from previous works, while the adjoining panel (60 × 72 inches) was completed this year. This format brings together what is carried over and what is newly made, allowing past and present surfaces to meet within a single image.

In Moveable Feast, a fragmented figure stretches across both panels. Constructed from collaged fabric, the body remains visibly incomplete, like a statue with broken limbs. A tablecloth spans the composition, draped and folded as if in the process of being put away. Positioned just in front of the canvas, the hand casts a shadow that folds back into the image, extending the work into the viewer’s space. Despite its fragmentation, the piece remains open—its elements dispersed yet still held together by gesture and memory.

The title draws from the term “moveable feast,” which originates in the liturgical calendar, where certain feast days shift each year rather than remaining fixed. More broadly, it suggests something portable—an experience or memory carried across time and place. Here, it reflects the transience of shared moments and the ways they persist in altered forms. The tablecloth, used during family meals throughout the pandemic, anchors the work in lived experience, recalling gatherings that gradually dissolved as routines resumed.

The Uttermost Parts, while mirroring this structure, turns inward. A hand sculpture faces a narrower 60 × 20 inch panel marked by accumulated paint and a larger adjoining panel that is almost entirely submerged in black. From this darkened surface, remnants of earlier paint and texture remain exposed, forming faint, residual shapes that suggest a torso and fragments of limbs. The head of this partially revealed body is a self-portrait, emerging from and dissolving back into the ground. Where Moveable Feast disperses, this work contains—its image less assembled than excavated, as if drawn out from layers of concealment. The reused canvas of the larger panel reinforces this sense of return, erasure, and reconstitution.

The accompanying series, Gatherings, consists of five 30 × 25 inch mixed-media works on paper. Fragments of the same tablecloth and worn shirts form their surfaces, over which rough, unfinished portraits of myself and my wife emerge and recede into the patterned ground. These smaller works echo the larger pieces, holding intimacy and distance in tension, as images surface and fall back into the material that carries them.

Across the exhibition, acts of assembling, breaking, covering, and revealing become ways of approaching wholeness. The works move between dispersion and containment, absence and presence, suggesting that completeness is not restored intact but encountered in fragments, through persistence.

These pieces are, in this sense, meditations on finding sustenance in the midst of lack—on how physical struggle can open into another form of nourishment. The materials themselves bear this out: worn, handled, and repurposed, they endure, carrying forward what has been used, tested, and lived through.

The exhibition draws, quietly, from the passage in Deuteronomy that recalls a people led through the wilderness—humbled, made to hunger, and then fed with what they did not know. “Man does not live by bread alone,” but by what sustains beyond the visible and the immediate. In this context, gathering becomes not only an act of bringing things together, but of remembering: tracing the way something is held, provided for, and made whole over time, even as it passes through states of fragmentation and need.